The French Chef in America

by Alex Prud'Homme

  It was only later that she’d realize what the couple represented: they were heralds of a new order, the postwar, modernized—Americanized—France. It was a trend that sent a chill down Julia’s spine. She worried that quick burgers, frozen foods, and plastic wrap were insinuating themselves into the hallowed precincts of la cuisine française, and would tear apart the country’s traditional social fabric, built around food.

  Patricia Simon stayed with Simca and Jean at Bramafam, which was twice the size of La Pitchoune, for a week. Simca’s dining room was an intimate, low-ceilinged space decorated with antiques and flowers; in the kitchen, a potholder hanging on the wall read: “I love Julia Child.”

  Several days before the field trip to L’Oasis, Simca and Julia communicated in a swirling gust of Franglais as they set out lunch at Bramafam: cold mushrooms with garlic, lemon, and rosemary; sweet new radishes accompanied by a baguette and fresh butter; rognons de veau et mirepoix; pommes chasseur; an elaborate salade verte; and white wine. The cheese course included Gruyère and Gorgonzola, and, for dessert, cherries picked from the tree outside.

  “Simca is une force de la nature,” Julia said.

  “You are rather energetic yourself, my dear,” Paul interjected.

  While Simca had hints of the refined British actress Margaret Leighton and the cool detachment of the German Marlene Dietrich, Simon discerned, she was “above all French, the most French person I had ever encountered.”

  II. “LA SUPER FRANÇAISE”

  Like Julia, Simca had been raised in a wealthy family in a large house with staff, had adventures with her husband during the Second World War, attended the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, was childless, drove like a maniac, and was married to an accommodating gourmet. Unlike Julia, Simca was a devout Catholic (Julia was a committed atheist), had little patience for children, preferred dogs to cats, and was resolutely unconcerned about the nitty-gritty details of recipes.

  The Childs referred to Simca as “La Super Française” because she embodied a dynamic, self-reliant, bullheaded kind of Frenchwoman whom Julia admired. But the nickname was used half in compliment and half in regret, for Simca could be warm and charming one minute but cold and harshly critical the next. She focused on whatever task was at hand—reading, talking, cooking, driving—with a ferocious, monomaniacal energy. She told Patricia Simon:

  In the morning I do my research. I read, I read, I read all what I am reading. I make notes. Books, newspapers. Many times I read old books—bought years and years ago—out of print fifty years. It’s so useful to see what people did then. The people who wrote those old books—they had no idea of expensive. Dozens of eggs or pounds of butter meant nothing to them! But in the recipe—ah!, very often, something interesting about how it is done, some special interesting detail, a little trick of making something.

  I also of course read modern books, too…In the afternoon, if I have a very special appointment, I go out. But usually it is then that I begin to typewrite my notes. And then I begin to try recipes. My maid, Camille, helps me. If something seems not correct or perfect, I wait to do it again, until it’s good. Then I send it to Julia. Then she sometimes tries it three or four times.

  …You see, I could be doing something—going to a party or playing bridge—but I am doing something who is so important, so sérieux, that I wouldn’t want to do that. I have my work. You see, what I am trying to do is a kind of cooking who is not classique, who is very good and easy. I am doing something who is so exciting, I want to do it fully, so completely.

  “SIMCA” was a nickname. She had been baptized Simone Suzanne Renée Madeleine Beck, and was raised in an aristocratic household in Normandy. She detested the name Simone, and her brothers Maurice and Bernard nicknamed her “Nonne.” The Becks lived in a grand house in Rainfreville, northeastern France, about ten miles from the English Channel. The family took food and wine seriously, and insisted on sit-down meals that highlighted Norman specialties—a diet famously based on butter, cream, pork, beef, apples, and Calvados, the fiery brandy known as “the spirit of Normandy.”

  As a chatelaine (a woman in charge of a large household), Simca’s mother, Madeleine Le Grand, did not cook. But she was a stylish dame with a sophisticated palate, whose family had made a fortune manufacturing Benedictine, a popular liqueur. She taught her children how to manage people efficiently, if not warmly. Simca’s father, Maurice Beck, was a tall, charming man who ran a factory that made silicate powder for ceramic tiles. And he was a crack shot who brought home partridge, rabbit, and venison in season.

  In the Beck household, children were not allowed in the kitchen. But as a seven-year-old, Simone bonded with the cook, Zulma, a sturdy Norman woman who clandestinely taught her how to work with food. Their first lesson was on boeuf bourguignon. A typical Zulma lunch menu included a beetroot salad with apples and potatoes, chicken in tarragon cream sauce, and flan with apples. Simca learned them all by heart. “Zulma had a lifelong influence on me…she was gifted with an almost atavistic sense of how to cook, how to use food, how to prepare it in ways that make it both delicious and healthy,” Simca recalled. “Under her tutelage, I got a physical grasp of how to deal with food…How to make short pastry, good desserts, sauce bases, and much more.”

  As a girl, Simone was opinionated and impulsive, an energetic tomboy who would rather compete with her brothers at running, swimming, or horseback riding than play with dolls. Her father taught her basic car repair, and Simone drove, she admitted, “like a demon.” She had a crush on Charles Lindbergh and dreamed of becoming a pilot, but her parents forbade it and steered her into more feminine pursuits, such as piano, singing, and bookbinding.

  At nineteen, Simone married an ineffectual older man and lived what she called “a butterfly life” in Paris. But in 1933, when she was twenty-nine, everything changed: her father died of leukemia, she divorced her husband (a rare occurrence for a Catholic woman), and she dedicated herself to cooking. The latter was considered nearly heretical for members of her class, but Simone Beck was nothing if not willful.

  Enrolling at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Simone arranged for private lessons with Henri-Paul Pellaprat, co-founder of the school and author of the classic L’Art Culinaire Moderne (Modern Culinary Art). He helped Simone broaden her repertoire to include Escoffier-worthy haute cuisine dishes, such as turbot en soufflé, galantines, iced soufflés, and the like.

  Simone Beck stood five feet eight inches tall, which was large for a Frenchwoman at the time, and was rapier-thin. One day in 1936, she was trying to wedge her lanky frame into her small car—a Renault Simca—when a handsome man chuckled, and said, “What a big chassis for such a little car!”

  His name was Jean Fischbacher. He was a dermatological chemist from Alsace. His flirtatious opening line would lead to her nickname, “Simca,” which Simone far preferred to her given name.

  Jean wooed Simca with his good looks, humor, and impeccable manners. His knowledge of wine and skill at deboning a fish “were terribly important to me—the signs of breeding and good manners,” Simca wrote. Jean was far more sensuous than her first husband, encouraging this “proper woman” to drink Champagne, lounge on satin cushions, and make love. “I was beginning to discover something I guess I could call happiness, even euphoria, emotions I began to feel I’d been cheated out of [in my first marriage],” she recalled.

  Though he was a Protestant and she was a divorced Catholic, they managed to placate their parents and church authorities, and married in 1937. Two years later, the war arrived on their doorstep.

  Simca hid her family’s valuable collection of wine and Champagne in the basement at Rainfreville, while Jean joined the infantry and fought the Boches on the Maginot Line. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for valor, but in 1940 was captured and imprisoned for the remainder of the war. Twice, Simca managed to convince the Nazis to allow her to visit Jean (she sewed secret messages into the figs she brought him), but the war was a time of great deprivation and sacrifi
ce.

  When he was released in 1945, Jean was awarded the Legion of Honor by Charles de Gaulle. Simca cooked a fabulous meal and hosted a welcome-home party for him, but after the gruel he had subsisted on in the prison camps, he became violently ill on her rich food. Jean and Simca “felt almost like strangers” at first. But as they reacquainted, food became more central to their lives than ever.

  Living in Paris, Jean invented a successful face cream made from ground oyster shells. Simca joined an exclusive women’s food club, Le Cercle des Gourmettes. By 1951, she was working with a fellow gourmette, Louisette Bertholle, on a French cookbook for the American market. Louisette had traveled widely in America, where she’d met plenty of people who loved French food, and had suggested the project. The two cooks created a large, if unfocused, pile of recipes and handed them to a freelance food editor, who was supposed to Americanize them. The freelancer disappeared shortly after that.

  It was then, at a Parisian party in the fall of 1951, that George Artamonoff, the former president of Sears International, introduced Simca to a thirty-nine-year-old American named Julia Child. Within days, Simca had introduced Julia to Louisette, and by early 1952 the three friends had started to teach cookery to American women at L’École des Trois Gourmandes (the School of the Three Hearty Eaters) in the Childs’ apartment on the Rue de l’Université. Once they had established a good working relationship, Simca and Louisette tentatively asked if Julia might, possibly, be willing to help them finish a French cookbook for the American market that they had been working on for two years. “Mais oui!” Julia cried in delight. She loved the idea, but was disappointed to find that her friends had created a “jumble of recipes.” So, in her pleasant way, she set about to quietly reinvent the book for readers like herself.

  Drawing from their lesson plans, the three co-authored the 684-page Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which, after nine years of work, one failed publishing deal, and two rejections, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in the States in the fall of 1961. Their aim, Julia wrote, was to take “French cooking out of cuckoo land and bring it down to where everybody is.”

  Since then, Louisette had moved on to other things, but Simca continued to give cooking classes in her apartment in Neuilly, on the out skirts of Paris. She was an intuitive, inspired cook, who “had a highly developed palate,” said Judith Jones. “You could trust her taste. And she developed many more recipes than Julia. But she wasn’t careful about [quantities] and timing.”

  In contrast to Simca’s “artistic” approach, Julia took a more dogged, pragmatic approach to cookery, and wanted to know “everything about everything.” Julia—who had lots of questions, and was a veteran diplomatic party giver—put herself in her reader’s shoes. She included notes about ingredients, cookware, and how much of a recipe could be done ahead of time—“these were absolute innovations,” Jones said. Paul also contributed: he wrote a primer on wine and drew many of the technical illustrations in the book; working together, he and Julia invented a new way to depict the steps of a recipe from the cook’s perspective.

  The Julia Child–Simca Beck collaboration was remarkable and history making. In 1966, Avis DeVoto visited La Pitchoune and observed of the two at work:

  This is certainly one of the great collaborations in history. They are absolutely necessary to each other and it is a happy miracle that they found each other. It is the combination which makes their work so revolutionary, and for my money they are benefactors of the human race.

  Simca is a creative genius, as Julia wrote me, “a great fountain of ideas.” She is also inaccurate, illogical, hard to pin down, and stubborn as a mule. Julia is also very creative and is becoming more so. But the two women think differently. Julia is deeply logical, orderly, accurate, painstaking, patient, determined to get all this knowledge clearly on paper. And she can be just as stubborn as Simca is, and will plug away trying to convince Simca until suddenly Simca changes her position, and from then on she will talk as if it were her own idea all along…

  Simca would come in [to Julia’s kitchen] at any time, no planning ahead, looking determined. “Ma chérie…” and off to the races. These sessions might last an hour, or all morning, or all afternoon. And while it was going on, the two ladies were absolutely oblivious to anything else going on in the house, and I understood why Paul absented himself—shut himself in his room, or moved out to the cabanon. I would hear Simca’s voice going on and on, floods of French, Julia saying oui, oui, oui, at intervals, Simca’s voice rising. Simca had an idea and Simca was taking the lead. Julia was following, and trying to get Simca to measure, use measuring cups and spoons, be accurate. Simca thinks this is all a big joke, and sometimes forgets to do it, but if she remembers, or is reminded, she winks and shrugs shoulders, and does it…Julia always won in the end, because she keeps her head.

  III. THE THIRD WOMAN

  While writing Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the 1950s, Simca said, “I feel I was the prime mover, more of an authority on French food, more of a ‘boss.’ ” In the following decade, however, Julia found her stride and began to assert herself. “Julia had gained confidence and authority, especially as she was the one living in America, with instant access to the American food mentality and knowledge of products available there,” Simca recalled in her book Food & Friends. “I consider Volume II more Julia’s book than mine.”

  Judith Jones concurred. “If I had questions or comments on Volume II, I always addressed them to Julia,” she said. “She was a force by then. Less humble, more confident than during Volume I.” As was Jones herself.

  —

  JUDITH JONES IS an elfin figure, standing about five feet five inches tall, with shoulder-length brown-gray hair parted in the middle, high cheekbones, watchful eyes, and a strong will. She admits to having “an instinctive modesty,” and can appear flinty; but she is also quick to laugh and has an incisive mind. Paul Child described her as “an Irish faerie.” Julia thought of her as a “peerless editor,” trusted confidante, and stalwart friend. “Writing does not come easily for me,” Julia said. “But Judith makes it easier. Since she is a cook and a writer, she knows instinctively what I am trying to say. She knows how to bring it out of me.”

  Mrs. Jones was born Judith Bailey in 1924, which made her a dozen years younger than Julia. Her mother was English, her father was from Vermont, and the family divided its time between an apartment in New York City and a farm in East Hardwick, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Fine food was not a priority in the Bailey household. Judith came of age during the Depression and the Second World War, a period that marked a nadir in modern American cookery. Although her mother subscribed to a half dozen women’s magazines, she considered cooking a “demeaning” chore, and “European” foods, such as garlic, smelly and uncouth. It was an era of “hideous Puritanism,” Jones recalled. “We just didn’t talk about food at the table. I related it to sex in a way. There was an appetite, but you didn’t talk about it—which made it all the more fun.”

  The family maid, Mrs. Cooney, did the cooking and kept to a regimented diet: chipped beef on Wednesdays, pork chops on Thursdays, “the dreaded boiled cod and potatoes” on Fridays, and plenty of gray, overboiled vegetables at all times. “Bland, bland, bland,” Jones said with a scowl. “I had the feel for cooking, but no one to teach me.”

  After graduating from Bennington College in 1945, Judith Bailey returned to New York to work in publishing—first at Dutton, then at Doubleday—as an editorial assistant. In 1948, she and a friend embarked on what was supposed to be a three-week European vacation. She enjoyed Rome and Florence, but it was Paris that gripped Judith with a nearly mystical pull. Arriving in the city at dusk, she recalled, “something just happened inside of me in a way that I’d never experienced before. I just fell in love with the beauty of the light.” She also fell in love with the food, the excitement of shopping in the markets, and the French themselves. “I loved that the women could take a scarf and tie it so beautiful
ly, and that they loved their men.”

  Her allotted days there swept by, and her friend returned to New York. On the day that Judith was scheduled to leave, she accidentally on purpose left her wallet and passport in the Tuileries and was “forced” to stay in Paris. “I wanted to live like the French and shop and cook and get into publishing.” Wandering past the American Express office, she happened to meet a young American named Paul Chapin. He invited her to stay at his aunt’s large apartment on the Rue du Cirque, for free. Down the hall the painter Balthus had a room.

  Though she had no cookbook, and couldn’t afford cooking school, Judith began to cook for her roommates. Then she and a French boyfriend opened the apartment as a supper club for Americans. On a trip to southern France, she stumbled over Restaurant La Pyramide, the celebrated restaurant in Vienne, near Lyon. The chef was Fernand Point, a three-star chef generally acknowledged as “the father of modern French cooking,” whose experiments with lighter fare in the fifties led to the nouvelle cuisine revolution in the seventies. Jones’s meal that day was “a great experience—a turning point in my life,” she said, because it was so delicious and expertly presented. Back in Paris, she asked the butcher’s wife for recipes, and was inspired by eating briny cockles and wonderful entrecôte in restaurants, dishes she re-created at home. “I learned to cook by asking questions,” she said. “I needed to know why the coquilles Saint Jacques I ate at the little bistro was so much better than mine.”

  Doubleday opened an office in Paris and hired Judith Bailey as an editorial assistant. Intrigued by a rejected manuscript that had a photograph of a young girl on the cover, she eventually convinced her editors to publish it. The book was Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

  In December 1948, Judith Bailey knocked on the door of Evan Jones, the American editor and publisher of Weekend magazine, looking for a job. Jones was a native of Minneapolis, where his father edited The St. Paul Dispatch; was divorced (he had two daughters in the United States); and adored France and its garlicky sausages. She was hired immediately. They courted in Paris’s outdoor markets, smoky bistros, and grand cafés, and took occasional forays into the countryside. Judith and Evan Jones married in Vienna in 1951. Her family didn’t approve of Evan in much the way that Julia’s father, John “Big John” McWilliams (a conservative Republican businessman), didn’t approve of Paul Child (a liberal Democratic artist). “I was supposed to find a nice husband on Wall Street, join a club, and be in the Social Register,” Jones recalled. “It was that kind of insidious snobbery. What I wanted to be was free…I picked up some very bad habits in Paris, and I picked up a very nice husband.”